I woke up in the wee hours of Sunday morning and found myself obsessively mourning all the things in my world that have changed. It took me hours to get back to sleep.
Later on Sunday morning, I went outside to empty the trash. On the way back inside, I stopped to pull some weeds between the stepping stones. I noticed that the chickweed, a prolific plant that infests my garden during the early spring every year, was beginning to die back, as it always does when the weather starts to warm. It’s being replaced by thousands and thousands of seedlings for green ash and eastern redbud trees. This sequence is as predictable as daylight and darkness at my house every single year. Every year, I spend March in a losing battle with the chickweed and the rest of the warm weather months pulling up tree seedlings.
It struck me that though lots of things have changed and will continue to change, a lot of things have not changed at all. Like nature’s rhythms. The birds still flock to our feeder each morning and evening. The peonies are full of buds, and they will bloom like always in May. Humid afternoons still give birth to thundershowers.
With that in mind, this week I’ve been trying to keep my focus on the things that haven’t changed—on the points of continuity in my life. Life will go on. This too shall pass. In the words of the fourteenth century saint, Julian of Norwich, who witnessed an outbreak of the Black Death: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Besides pulling weeds (ok, that was sarcasm) , a highlight of my Sunday was listening to this lovely conversation between executive coach and wise man Jerry Colonna and designer Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness.
After losing her husband very suddenly, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandburg struggled to find resilience, and she turned to her friend, psychologist Adam Grant to understand more about cultivating resilience. The resulting collaboration was a book called Option B. Now they have released a new foreword for the book and a free excerpt online. This is well worth the read.
In this piece, writer Paul Ollinger advises us not to set unrealistic goals for ourselves during this time. He compares weathering the pandemic to flying with small children: “Today’s flight, dear friends, is very much delayed: not by hours, but months. Travel conditions are—to put it mildly—suboptimal. Each of us should have in mind only one goal: to arrive on the other side in one piece.”
And you have to watch this Tik Tok video that has gone viral. It’s by a Texas music teacher named Liz Ruchs Smith who just happens to be a graduate of my alma mater, Maryville College. She wrote a song to express how she feels about the shift to online teaching.
One of the things I’m learning about myself in this time is that I am not quite as introverted as I thought I was. I’m also learning that even introverts can be lonely while sheltering in place.